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D. Christian Lammerts is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Rutgers University, and affiliate faculty in the Department of History, the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, and the South Asian Studies Program.
Lammerts’ scholarship focuses on the interconnected ideas, histories, and practices of Buddhism and law, primarily in the contexts of precolonial and colonial Burma and Southeast Asia. He has written extensively on dhammasattha, the principal corpus of Buddhist legal literature and theory in mainland Southeast Asia during the 2nd millennium CE, whose laws partly survive in contemporary regional legal systems. His first book on this topic, Buddhist Law in Burma: A History of Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, 1250–1850, was published in 2018 by the University of Hawai`i Press. He is editor of Buddhist Dynamics in Premodern and Early Modern Southeast Asia and Southeast Asia editor of Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism.
Before joining Rutgers in 2012, Lammerts taught at the National University of Singapore. In 2019–2020 he was Visiting Professor in the Department of History, University of Yangon. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Buddhist Digital Resource Center and is a member of the Editorial Board of Buddhism, Law & Society.
Research Interests:
- Buddhism and law
- legal history of Southeast Asia
- Burmese and Pali literature
- manuscripts and epigraphy
Education:
- Ph.D., Cornell University
- M.A., Cornell University
- M.A., School of Oriental and African Studies
- B.A., Williams College